BATS; 30 Seconds With Tom Seaver: Family Spirit He Can Bottle

By JOE BRESCIA

Published: January 22, 2012

The Mets will be honored on the franchise's 50th anniversary at the Baseball Assistance Team's annual fund-raising dinner Tuesday in Manhattan. B.A.T. helps former players and baseball employees who have fallen on hard times.

The Hall of Famer Tom Seaver will be among the many former Mets and other players at the dinner. Seaver, 67, holds the team's career records for pitching victories (198) and strikeouts (2,541). He and his wife, Nancy, own Seaver Vineyards on Diamond Mountain in Calistoga, Calif. In a recent phone conversation, he spoke about wine, baseball and the Mets.

Q.

How do you spend your time now?

A.

I'm in the vineyard every day, and I do a lot of the grunt work. I don't do real technical stuff, but my learning curve has been rather good in understanding what goes on. But there's certain things I do not do, from a pruning point, etc.

Q. How is the business going?

A. Four vintages have come out now; 2005 was the first. The '08 got 97 points from The Wine Spectator. The decisions are made by my vineyard manager, Jim Barbour, and my winemaker, Thomas Brown. And Thomas's uncle was Bobby Richardson, the former Yankee. All the people at the vineyard and at Outpost, where my wine is vinified, are big baseball fans. So it's kind of a marriage made in heaven.

Q. What wine would you recommend for Mets fans to help make the season more palatable?

A. We just put out our '08, and it essentially sold out. But to get on our buyer list, Karen Seaver will help you. And it's kind of a family affair. Karen Seaver is running the business. She is married to my nephew, my brother's middle boy. There is some '07 left. But they're all very good.

Q. How will the Mets do?

A. They have to have a game plan. And when they hired Sandy Alderson, I'm sure he brought a game plan with him. You have to hand that responsibility to someone who has been in the arena and Sandy has been there. I'm sure he'll do a good job. And any time you rebuild, you have to have patience.

Q. What do you think about their pitching prospects, including Jeurys Familia, Matt Harvey and Zack Wheeler?

A. I'm a huge advocate of pitching. You have to have good pitching as the solid core, the foundation. It keeps you in every game.

Go back to '69. We were in every game we played. That raises the level of play of everybody else on the ball club. Because you're going to win by one run, or two runs. So that makes you hit the cutoff man, move the runner over and do the things that fundamentally make the ball club win. I'm sure that Sandy will be very strong at that.

Q. The Mets are looking for investors.

A. Hopefully, they can get the right people to be able to do it. I don't know the timeline. You would think you want try to get it done as quickly as you possibly can and then get the focus off that and get it back on the field.

Q. Do you have any interest in getting back into baseball?

A. I have no interest. I got very tired of the travel. I like being home with my wife, my three Labrador retrievers and the vineyard. But I have the same kind of stimulation that I had with baseball. I can't wait to get to the vineyard. I'm usually in the vineyard by 7 o'clock, seven days a week.

Q. What do think about the success that your former teammate Nolan Ryan has had as the president of the Texas Rangers?

A. He's done a wonderful job. But prior to that, he did a good job putting his cattle business together and a few other things. We were very close. He came light-years from where he was on those early Met teams we were on. He had the best talent of anybody on the club. I always knew he was going to do it. Here's a guy from Alvin, Tex., and you put him in the middle of New York City. My God. And he did not have college. Then he figured it out after they traded him. And I couldn't believe that they did trade him.

The story is he went to Anaheim and they said: ''Here's the ball, and you're pitching every time your slot comes up. We don't care if you're 0-20. You're pitching.'' They took all the pressure off him. And that's how you do it. You get in the pool, swim the laps and get it done. Like the way Rube Walker used to put it: if the ball's in your shoe, that means you're pitching today. All the disciplines he had in pitching he's transferred to his work with the Rangers. He knows the game.

Q. Ryan has campaigned against pitch counts. Do you agree?

A. There's nothing wrong with pitch counts. But there's an addendum to that. I presume Nolan thinks the same way. But it isn't a blanket pitch count. People say, ''I bet the pitch count drives you nuts.'' Heck no. I had a pitch count. My pitch count as a general rule was 135. And I knew how many pitches I had when I went to the mound for the last three innings. And I wasn't going to spend eight pitches on the No. 8 hitter. On the second or third pitch, he should be hitting a ground ball to shortstop. It might not work like that all the time. But theoretically, you have an approach about how you're spending your bullets.

There's nothing wrong with pitch counts. But not when it's spit out by a computer and the computer does not look at an individual's mechanics. And you can't look at his genes. It should come from the individual and the pitching coach and the manager.